It appeared to be importing a distinctly aspirational culinary sensibility to areas of the United States where you wouldn't necessarily expect it-one that felt strikingly cosmopolitan for the suburbs and the sort of suburban-feeling cities that abound in North Carolina, but also like a time-capsule from some hard-to-pinpoint recent past.
Still, its cultural significance seemed to extend beyond its high marks for value, selection, and customer service in the poll. In April, USA Today's Readers Choice Awards voted The Fresh Market as the Best Supermarket in America. I wasn't alone in feeling weirdly seduced by the place. Taken together with the smell of fresh-ground coffee and the subtly sedative effect of Chopin or Beethoven, it's enough to make you wonder if you've died and gone to suburban gourmand heaven. Warm, soft, and, according to GE Current, the product of energy-saving LED lamps with something called a "high-color rendering index," it's a far cry from the vibrating fluorescents most of us are accustomed to encountering at American supermarkets. Before you can take in the wall of gently misted organic produce, the luxurious olive oil selection, the deep bins of bulk nuts and dried fruit, and the improbably generous antipasto and olive bar-before, that is, you realize that the whole thing has been built to resemble a sort of fantasy version of a European open-air market, with all the different stalls brought together under one roof-the first thing your body registers is the light. Stepping past the threshold, it takes a few seconds for your senses to adjust. Outside on the sidewalk, a meticulously arranged display of spring flowers, or bags of charcoal for grilling, or pumpkins for carving, beckon you toward the sliding doors-always, like many things at The Fresh Market, pointedly in season. But it follows the same blueprint you can expect to see at many of The Fresh Market's 159 locations, which are scattered throughout suburban areas and small-to-midsize cities in the South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest. ( Reportedly, the grand opening involved a ceremonial cracking of a 95-pound wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano). The Hendersonville location of The Fresh Market, a decades-old North Carolina-born gourmet supermarket chain, is more modest in size and selection than the gleaming, palatial flagship the company opened a couple years ago in Charlotte. And though picturesque downtown Hendersonville-with its crystal shops, old timey ice cream shop, and dingy biker bar-suggests a degree of ideological diversity, it's hard to imagine gun-loving Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn, probably the biggest national figure to call this small western North Carolina city home, driving through the mind-numbing labyrinth of strip malls radiating out from the city center and choosing to pull over here. For one thing, there are already two other supermarkets-including state favorite Harris Teeter-within a stone's throw of its unremarkable brick façade, sandwiched between a PetSmart and a shuttered discount department store. What makes suburban dining great, and as the suburbs shift, how are suburban dining scenes changing? Read more here.Ī grocery store that plays classical music around the clock, offers several different varieties of climate-friendly toilet paper, and boasts its own private-label French raclette isn't the first thing you'd expect to see on Greenville Highway in Hendersonville, NC. MUNCHIES State of the Suburbs is an exploration of eating in the American suburbs today.
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